


Sometimes an Investigator

by Golga_Finch_Yum



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Cthulhu Wars (Board Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-25
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-12-06 15:09:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11603172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Golga_Finch_Yum/pseuds/Golga_Finch_Yum
Summary: As far as I can tell, nobody's written a fanfic set explicitly in the Cthulhu Wars board game (Onslaught 3 kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1816687860/cthulhu-wars-onslaught-3/ ) before. So I did. If you don't know Cthulhu Wars, just treat this story as a short Cthulhu Mythos tale about a future when all the Great Old Ones have awoken and are fighting over the Earth. (And you should check out Cthulhu Wars if you like asymmetric boardgames; it's got excellent mechanics and is great fun even before you consider the beautiful statues of Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones you use to play.)





	Sometimes an Investigator

**Author's Note:**

> I was inspired to write this when I read the rules for the protagonist. Naomi Joslyn belongs to Sandy Peterson and Peterson Games, no profit or ownership is intended.

The landscape around Naomi Joslyn had been desecrated. This didn’t mean the burnt fields, the brick skeletons of farmhouses, or the muddy craters from the military’s futile attempt to bombard the enemy long ago. There was something fundamentally wrong with reality here. A physicist had once told her that even elementary particles were different now. The electrons of every atom now moved in new orbits, perpetually tracing the shape of the Yellow Sign.

All of Europe was like this. And over the ridge was the thing responsible.

It hadn’t been difficult to find. Even without the yawning valleys it carved into the landscape as it moved, she’d heard the excruciating cries of the circling byakhee flocks several days before. Shortly before dawn she’d had to shoot a foraging undead that had caught her scent. She hated doing that, not for any love of the monster, but because she knew she couldn’t last long if it came to a fight. She’d learned to survive by avoiding such things.

But this was different. She climbed the newly-formed ridge, coming closer to her foe than she had in many weeks. There it was: a face the height of a skyscraper and sickly yellow, its mouth twisted in a perpetual roar of fury. Around it tentacles of unreality waved like streamers of folded night, floating above a landscape it thoughtlessly warped and twisted in its wake. Its undead minions walked through the newly-carved valley, a grotesque parody of bucolic meadows and creatures that only dimly resembled sheep. Hastur had been a god of shepherds, once.

The only reason why she was still alive, why she could see that enormous face without it turning its hideous gaze on her, was further in the distance. She could barely see it, and she doubted she’d see it any better if it was right in front of her. It was insubstantial, its weight and heft only visible when the sunlight caught it at the right angle and gave it an iridescent sheen. It reminded her of an enormous pile of soap bubbles, though she’d heard that if you stared at the bubbles long enough, you’d see an alien civilization at the heart of every one.

Yog-Sothoth had come to invade the Land of the Yellow Sign.

She took no pleasure in watching their minions clash and kill each other. Each was as bad as the other. They and their unholy kin had sacked the world, effortlessly swatting away humanity’s greatest weapons before turning on their own kind. If she could, she’d happily sweep them all from the face of the planet, but there was no way a human could do that, no matter how richly they sold their soul. She couldn’t even injure the self-proclaimed King in Yellow, much less Hastur itself.

So she intended to help someone who could.

Far away the titans fought. Light-absorbing tentacles lashed out, bursting bubbles as they swept, while from other bubbles came spears of light of a color that hurt Naomi’s eyes to look at. As they did so, she unslung her rifle and began her inspection ritual. A byakhee screech made her look up, but it was far overhead, and soon dove towards the melee. As it flew an abomination’s claw shot out and tore off one of its wings.

She unhooked the magazine, took out the topmost cartridge and exchanged it for a cartridge from her pocket. This was different from the others. She felt a tiny crackle of static electricity when she picked it up, even through the jacket. But it wasn’t static. It persisted, pricking her fingers every moment that she held it, and she quickly pushed it into the magazine.

She didn’t know how it or the other three were made. A fellow investigator had given them to her, someone who’d gone to the center of the Land of the Yellow Sign where the cultists had first begun. Amongst the tortured topography you could find little shards of a glass-like substance that ate at your fingers worse than white phosphorus. It was supposedly fragments of an elder sign, the spell-like bindings that had once held Hastur in some unknown dimension. Once they were shattered they fell, their fragments transmuting into glass-like shards on passing into this reality.

One of those shards was at the core of this cartridge.

She snapped the magazine back into place and checked the rifle over again. She used to prefer sighting with her left eye, but that wasn’t an option now, so she peered with her one remaining eye at the clashing monsters. She had no idea who was winning, nor did she much care. There were a few more dead monsters in the world, but the cultists would always summon more.

Hastur was screaming now. Even from here it made Naomi’s ears wince. Yog-Sothoth shuddered as a large blob of bubbles all popped, the alien worlds within blinking out. A spear of light, which had been glowing from blue to violet to a color that scraped against her eyes, faded back into the mundane spectrum.

The scream ended, and though Hastur’s face was still locked in a perpetual snarl she suspected it was pleased. She peered down the iron sight, not that it helped much. Her rifle wasn’t exactly accurate at this range, and besides, it didn’t matter where she hit it. But she aimed between the eyes anyway. Every so often her target was blocked by one of those thrashing tentacles, but they weren’t in the way most of the time. Besides, she had another three bullets left, though she’d prefer to save them for another time.

A tentacle passed. The brow was clear. She fired. She had no idea where she hit it, but she knew she did, because the face began to turn towards her.

The bullet hadn’t harmed it. Of course it hadn’t. Firing shards of a smashed elder sign at a monster was akin to hurling a pair of handcuffs towards a fleeing convict. The elder sign was broken and, unless some human figured out how to cast them, would never be whole again. But there was something in those shards, some insubstantial resonance that not even passing through dimensions and fusing into glass could erase. Something that momentarily attracted the attention of a Great Old One.

There was no point in running. If it attacked, she was dead, and fleeing on her feet was no more satisfying than cowering here. So she watched as the hideous skyscraper-sized face moved with the terrifying inevitability of a glacier.

Then a beam of light struck it. A different hue from the others, something she could actually see. There was red in it, and black, and bright vivid green. It added up to no earthy color she’d even seen. The light sliced through Hastur’s eyeball with no more resistance than if it was shining through a lens. For a moment the eyeball vanished. A soap bubble filled the socket, and beneath its rainbow sheen Naomi thought she saw a city in its center. Its minarets were burning.

The bubble popped. The enormous face hung in the air, one eye a hollow gulf. The tentacles waved frantically. Then, with the grace of a crashing dirigible, Hastur fell to the ground.

She turned and ran, then. Perhaps Hastur’s minions would manage to kill Yog-Sothoth or drive it back to its domain. But she’d done what she could, and now it was time to leave.

Hastur wasn’t dead, of course. In the center of the Land of the Yellow Sign, ringed by the glassy shards of shattered elder signs, the cultists would raise it again. But it would take a while. For a short time, Europe would be free of its tyrannical master. Naomi had learned to take her victories where she could.

Besides, when the cultists performed their dread ceremony and returned Hastur to the mortal world, she’d be waiting. After all, she still had three bullets left.


End file.
